hxxps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/07/13/feature/in-all-reality-there-were-three-shooters-oklahomans-kill-an-active-shooter-and-its-not-as-simple-as-it-sounds/?utm_term=.c5991d397256Mark Berman
JULY 13, 2018
OKLAHOMA CITY
‘Good guys with guns’: Oklahomans kill an active shooter, and it's not as simple as it sounds.
Juan Carlos Nazario was sitting on a lakeside bench waiting to play soccer when he heard the staccato popping of gunshots outside Louie’s On the Lake, a popular waterfront grill and pub. He ran to his car to get his gun and moved toward the sounds.
Bryan Whittle was driving with his wife, heading off for a Memorial Day weekend getaway, when he saw a commotion outside Louie’s. He thought someone might be drowning, so instead of turning his truck onto the highway, he barreled into the parking lot to offer help. As he jumped out, what he learned stunned him: There was an active shooter just yards away, and wounded victims were holed up in the restaurant’s bathroom.
Whittle, too, grabbed his gun.
In a matter of seconds, the two armed citizens became self-appointed protectors, moving to take up positions around the shooter, drawing their weapons and shouting for him to drop his. Time stretched and warped. There was an exchange of gunfire. The gunman was hit several times and fell. As Nazario and Whittle converged over the man to restrain him, police arrived. Unsure who was who, officers handcuffed all of the men and put them on the ground as the shooter bled out into the grass and died.
“I was just doing what I was supposed to do,” recalled Nazario, a former police officer who said he now works as a security guard, always has his gun in the car and usually carries it with him.
“I just reacted,” said Whittle, who has served for nearly 20 years in the Oklahoma Air National Guard and works for the Federal Aviation Administration. “There’s a guy with a gun. I’ve got a gun. Stop the threat.”
Though they were loaded into police cars and taken downtown for questioning, they were soon hailed as heroes. They were also called champions of Second Amendment rights, gun-carrying examples of why Oklahoma’s Republican governor should not have vetoed a bill two weeks earlier that would have eliminated the need for a permit and training to carry a gun in public.
In a nation grappling with frequent mass shootings, Second Amendment activists have urged that more people carry guns so that they are prepared, like Nazario and Whittle, to respond to an armed threat. The morning after the May 24 Oklahoma City shooting, the National Rifle Association tweeted that it was “just another example of how the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Local police also praised Nazario and Whittle, saying their swift response ended what a police spokesman called “a very dangerous situation.”
But police also noted that armed citizens can complicate volatile situations. The first of 57 uniformed police officers arrived just a minute after the initial 911 calls and found a complex scene with multiple armed people and no clear sense of what had happened or who was responsible.
“We don’t want people to be vigilantes,” Bo Mathews, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City Police Department, said in a recent interview. “That’s why we have police officers.”
Both men did what they believed was right, but that meant they had killed a man they did not know. Whittle wondered whether he was going to jail. Nazario went over ways that the confrontation could have ended differently — perhaps with his own death. They both marveled that amid the chaos, the result was as intended: The attacker was stopped before he could hurt anyone else.
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